Our philosophy at Tiller is to pay attention to the future, not the past. When our time is limited, we have a much bigger impact focusing on today and this week rather than yesterday and last year. That said, if you really want to get that old data into your Tiller Sheet, we’ve added a new guide about importing Mint data. It complements our other guide on manually importing bank data.

We see a lot of customers coming to Tiller after starting first with Mint. These users make the switch because they want custom reports and more control over their data, which Tiller and Google Sheets offer.

If you’re looking to get Tiller’s daily financial data feeds in a Google Sheet, but you can’t live without your historic Mint data, we’ve put together a quick guide to help you export your Mint data over to your Tiller Sheet.

Get your data out of Mint

The first step is to export your transactions from Mint. When you log into your Mint account choose the Transactions menu option. We recommend that you do one account at a time if you have multiple accounts connected to Mint because it makes formatting the data for use in your Tiller Sheet more manageable. At the bottom of the page there is an export link that will automatically download a CSV file of your transactions.

Once you have that file you’ll want to upload it to your Google Drive and open it with Google Sheets so you can arrange the data for use in Tiller. From your Google Drive choose the “new” button, choose “File Upload” and then select the CSV file from wherever your downloads are stored on your computer.

Double click the file to open it and view it in the browser. Click the “Open with” button at the top and then choose “Google Sheets” to create a Google Sheets version of the CSV for quick and easy editing.

Exporting your data from Mint

Check out your Tiller Sheet column order

Open up the Tiller Sheet that you’d like to add this Mint data to from your Tiller Dashboard. Verify the column order in your Tiller Sheet. Note, that your column order might be different than the ordering in the instructional animations below so be sure to double-check.

To match our Mint data to our Tiller Sheet, we moved the amount column in our Mint data sheet to the right of the description column. You can reorder any column by hovering over the column header until the hand icon appears, click and then drag. Then we moved the Original Description, which we’ll use for the Full Description on the Transactions Tab, over the the far right.

Because Mint doesn’t automatically format the amount column as currency with the correct debit or credit notation you’ll need to update the data in the amount column to reflect what’s in the “Transaction Type” column from the Mint CSV export file.

You can do this quickly in three steps. Create two additional columns to the left of the Amount column (which we renamed Mint Amount) in your Mint data sheet. One for a formula (which we called “Amount Formula” in the animation) and one for the values generated by the formula (which we named Amount). Next, type the formula into the first empty cell in the amount formula column. Take note that the cells referenced in the formula may be different in your sheet depending on how they’re ordered.

=if(F2=”credit”,E2,-E2)

The formula essential looks for the value in the “Transaction Type” column, in this case column F. If it’s a credit (or income) then the Mint Amount remains a positive number, if it’s not then it assigns a minus sign to notate it as a debit (or expense).

Then you can use a quick fill method by hovering your mouse in the lower right corner of that cell, clicking the blue square that appears, and dragging that formula down to the bottom of your sheet to quickly fill in the correct amount for all the cells.

Finally, we want to copy this formula data from the “Amount Formula” column into our “Amount” column. This will ensure our data isn’t dependent on the original “Mint Amount” column. Select all the data in the “Formula Amount” column, copy it, highlight the top empty cell in the “Amount” column, right click and choose “Paste special > Values only” from the Edit menu. Then you can delete the “Mint Amount”, the “Transaction Type”, and the “Formula Amount” columns since they’re no longer needed. Finally, select the entire “Amount” column and change the number format to currency, using the “Number > Currency” option in the Format menu.

Formatting your data from Mint to use in a Tiller Sheet

Mint categories might not match up

We also recommend that you move the data in the category column from your Mint CSV export to the notes column because the categories between Mint and your Tiller Sheet will not likely match.

Finalize the order of your columns to match your Tiller Sheet, add the Account # and Account Institution columns and then you’re ready to paste the data into your Tiller Sheet.

Finalizing the column order for your Mint data for use in a Tiller Sheet

Add the Mint data to your Tiller Transactions tab

You may not need every single transaction that’s in this Mint export if you’ve been using Tiller for some time, as is the case in our example, so start with the first transaction date that’s not in your Tiller Transactions tab, select all the rows below it, right click, and choose copy.

Find the first empty row at the bottom of your Transactions tab and paste the Mint data. We updated the formatting for the date column to left align the dates in our example and did a copy and paste of the Account # and Institution since we’re focusing on one at a time.

Adding your Mint data to your Tiller Transactions tab

The final step, to ensure that your filters work properly, is to turn the filter off and then back on for your Tiller Sheet. You can do this by clicking the square in the top left of your Tiller Transactions tab and then choose “Turn Filter off” from the main tool menu and then turn it back on.

Updating the filtered area on your Tiller Transactions tab

Feel free to categorize this imported Mint data in your Tiller Sheet using your Tiller categories if you want. It really depends on what you’re trying to do. If you’re in doubt, leave your old data uncategorized and focus on making sure today’s, tomorrow’s, and next week’s new expenses are categorized rather than grooming all of your old data.

Have you manually added your Mint data to Tiller using other steps? We’d love to hear about your experience. You can ping us in the chat window.

The Power of a Spreadsheet

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Heather comes from a background of user experience design & customer support. She loves helping others learn, explore and discover better ways to use applications and products that improve their lives. When she’s not coaching customers on Tiller best practices, tweeting or writing blogs, she’s probably at a yoga class, out for a hike in the Blue Ridge, or off volunteering for a variety of non-profits.

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